Collection shows author walking a tightrope

Sunday

Aug 29, 2010 at 12:01 AMSep 14, 2010 at 2:34 PM

Half a century ago, for better or worse, James Baldwin was one of the main spokesmen for black America, translating the black experience to the middle-class white readers who made up much of his audience.

The pieces collected in The Cross of Redemption were first published in newspapers and magazines and have been arranged in book form for the first time. They range from feisty book reviews from the 1940s, when Baldwin was in his 20s, to a few interviews and speeches from the 1980s, the decade in which he died.

Half a century ago, for better or worse, James Baldwin was one of the main spokesmen for black America, translating the black experience to the middle-class white readers who made up much of his audience.

The pieces collected in The Cross of Redemption were first published in newspapers and magazines and have been arranged in book form for the first time. They range from feisty book reviews from the 1940s, when Baldwin was in his 20s, to a few interviews and speeches from the 1980s, the decade in which he died.

But most of the essays by the author of Another Country and The Fire Next Time are from the 1960s, a decade of change and one in which Baldwin found himself in an uneasy relationship with the new black radicals a decade or two younger than he was. His attitude toward Stokely Carmichael, Bobby Seale and Angela Davis - to whom he addressed an open letter signed "Brother James" - is as mixed as was theirs toward him.

The volume, which includes 56 pieces, has been neatly and skillfully edited by professor and novelist Randall Kenan, who provides a perceptive introduction and brisk historical context for Baldwin's work.

Over and over again, with what seems like increasing exasperation, Baldwin addresses what was called at the time "the Negro problem." By 1964, he observes that as a black writer, "People talk to me absolutely bathed in a bubble bath of self-congratulation. I mean, I walk into a room, and everyone there is terribly proud of himself because I managed to get to the room."

By 1969, he observes that "the bulk of this country's white population impresses me, and has so impressed me for a very long time, as being beyond any conceivable hope of moral rehabilitation."

With what must have been some relief, Baldwin also occasionally gets to write about topics other than race, even if race tangentially enters the discussion.

His description of the days leading up to the two-

minute, six-second prizefight between Floyd Patterson and Sonny Liston sketches convincing portraits of both men as well as the baffled Baldwin himself.

And when he gives himself over to analyzing a book that he's surprised to find himself admiring, he conjures up perfectly the source of the work's power: Rereading Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped decades after his first encounter with it, he notes that "all of Stevenson's warm brutal innocence is here, the sensation of light and air, the nervous tension, the chase, the victory."

Throughout the collection, the tension between Baldwin as an individual and as a reluctant representative of his race makes itself felt.

Writing in a letter from Africa in 1963, he says, "I have said for years that color does not matter. I am now beginning to feel that it does not matter at all, that it masks something else which does matter: But this suspicion changes, for me, the entire nature of reality."

The occasional writings of The Cross of Redemption reveal a writer struggling, not always successfully, to reconcile his personal self with his political persona as he finds himself trapped in the spotlight.